Unit 2. Sound film (1929-1934)

Wi th the establishment of Soyuzkino, the all-union organization in charge of production and distribution, the film industry entered a new era; but it also did so because of the arrival of sound, which meant that new equipment had to be installed, forcing an overhaul of the industry. Warner Brothers had introduced sound in 1926 (Vitaphone, recording sound separately), and Fox launched the Movietone sound system in 1927. In Moscow, Pavel Tager (1903-1971) was working on sound systems at Mezhrabpom when Alexander Shorin (1890-1941) equipped Leningrad’s Sovkino with sound. However, sound was slow to be adopted both by filmmakers and the industry, where additional problems were encountered at the level of distribution.

The different aesthetic principles for silent and sound film had worried filmmakers since the late 1920s. In 1928 Pudovkin, Eisenstein and his assistant Grigori Alexandrov had issued a manifesto on sound, advocating sound not to provide a realistic acoustic narrative, but to use music, words and sounds to counterpoint the images, thus complementing the visual montage with a sound montage. They contended that the montage of sound should run parallel to a montage of images, making sound essentially a-synchronous in a work of vertical montage (sound on top of image or vice versa).

Sound was used in documentaries, such as Abram Room’s The Plan for Great Works (Plan velikikh rabot [Piatiletka], Soyuzkino1929/30), a film about the Five Year Plan, which also contained animated sequences. Documentary film adopted to sound easily and successfully. Vertov’s Enthusiasm – The Donbass Symphony (Simfoniia Donbassa – Entuziazm, VUFKU 1930) combined sound montage with edited documentary footage in an experimental and original manner.

T he earliest fiction films with sound were Yuli Raizman’s (photo on the left) (1903-1994) The Earth Thirsts (Zemlia zhazhdet, Vostokkino 1931) about a multi-ethnic group of engineers who build an irrigation system in a Turkmen village. The film relies on the plot to show the linear development of the local people from an unenlightened mass to a conscious collective, as well as the rapid industrialization of the countryside and the integration of the socialist republics of Central Asia.

Kozintsev’s and Trauberg’s Alone (Odna, Soyuzkino Leningrad 1931) contained fragments of dialogue, but the most prominent sound effects were those of new machines. With the skilful use of alarm clocks and telephones – as signs of new technology – permeating the narrative, as well as the radio providing a guiding commentary on the action, Kozintsev and Trauberg accompanied the reluctant move of the novice teacher Yelena Kuzmina from Leningrad to a remote area in Altai where she has been assigned her first job. The cultural contrast between the technologically developed city and the Altai region still under the spell of shamanism, could hardly be greater. Kuzmina struggles against the village elders in their reluctance to accept progress, until she is seriously injured and airlifted – leaving behind a village that begins to accept the values she has tried to instil in them and echoing the ideological message of Raizman’s films.

By 1934 films provided a realistic narrative through dialogue, such as Nikolai Ekk’s (1902-1976) The Path to Life (Putevka v zhizn’, Mezhrabpom 1931), which also uses folk music. It tells the story of the commissar Nikolai Sergeev (Nikolai Batalov), who reforms a gang of orphans living in an open camp. The appearance on screen of besprizorniki (homeless orphans) reminded the viewer of the great number of children left without parents after the turmoil of a world war and a civil war. The orphans were portrayed through their use of language, each speaking in a different manner: Kolka with his communist ideals, or Dandy Mustafa Fert (played by the poet and actor Iyvan Kyrla [Kirill Ivanov] born in Mari El 1909, and purged in 1937; died 1943), with his eccentric ways. Sergeev engages them through common work on a railway line leading to the camp, highlighting the construction theme typical of Soviet culture of the time, but also the railway that will connect the camp with the outside world. The gang of Zhigan (Mikhail Zharov, 1900-81, the notorious ‘baddie’) undermines S ergeev’s efforts, and kills Mustafa during a sabotage attempt.

Direcred by Nikolai Ekk (photo on the right) Grunia Kornakova (also The Little Nightingale, Mezhrabpomfilm 1936) was the first Soviet colour film and is set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, where Grunia’s father works as caretaker at a porcelain factory. The film follows Grunia from her duties at home to her role as a Revolutionary leader in the uprising of the exploited workforce at the factory. The film is set on Christmas Eve, but there is no carnival spirit and no relaxation of class divisions commonly associated with the holiday: the happy seclusion of the Kornakov family is a mere illusion of peace that crumbles away when a fire destroys the factory, thus enabling the proprietor, drawing on insurance funds, to replace the wooden building with a new brick wing – at the cost of thirty-nine lives, among them Grunia’s father. The film points up the backwardness of folk beliefs and their danger to Revolutionary energy: if Grunia had not been torn away from her Christmas tree by the events, she would never have become a Revolutionary and fought for the workers’ social cause. The blame for the lack of social progress is laid at the feet of bourgeois traditions that have no room in Stalin’s Russia: Christmas. As such, Grunia Kornakova is very much a film of the 1930s, made at the beginning of the Purges.

As Socialist Realism gripped literature, Boris Shumiatsky (in charge of Soyuzkino) hoped to create a cinema for the millions and entertain the masses. He wanted filmmakers to appeal to the consciousness of people with an engaging plot and do what the Aviators' March had articulated: ‘to turn a fairy tale into reality’. They should create films that were fairy tales rooted in Soviet reality – of workers achieving their dreams, since the main principle of happiness according to Soviet ideology lay in hard physical labour (which is therefore choreographed and executed in light, ballet-like movements). Cinderella stories of weavers coming to Moscow to ‘play’ on the machines in the textile industry, of peasants rejoicing in the working of the fields and happily riding on tractors, all beautifully and neatly dressed, with smiles that reveal their immaculate white teeth and red cheeks as a sign of health, were the staple diet of the 1930s. The culmination of personal happiness often lay in meeting a nice man (or woman) and infallibly, an encounter with Stalin, direct or indirect, that allowed them to understand the meaning of communism. Such were the dream plots of Socialist Realist musicals. Since films were supposed to show reality developing towards a bright future, the present – if it features at all – is a mere transition phase, an accident or a bump on the road that leads to higher realms. One may infer here a parallel between Orthodoxy, where believers expect a reward for earthly sufferings in the other world, and communism, adopting religious concepts to exploit folk rituals and faith for its own ends, as it also evident in the replacement of religious icons through portraits of the leaders.

TASKS